Detection of periodicity in eukaryotic genomes on the basis of power spectrum analysis.

Abstract

In the present study, we identified periodic patterns in nucleotide sequence, and characterized nucleotide sequences that confer periodicities to Arabidopsis thaliana and Drosophila melanogaster on the basis of a power spectrum method and frequency of nucleotide sequences. To assign regions that contribute to each periodicity we calculated periodic nucleotide distributions by a parameter proposed in the paper. In A. thaliana, we obtained three periodicities (248 bp-, 167 bp-, and 126 bp) in chromosome 3, three peaks (174 bp-, 88 bp-, and 59 bp-period) in chromosome 4, and four periodicities (356 bp, 174 bp, 88 bp, and 59 bp) in chromosome 5. These are relation to ORF that consists of Gly-rich amino acid sequences including histone protein that consists of Gly-, Ser-, and Ala-rich amino acids residues. For D. melanogaster genome we found that G or C spectral curves have flat region at middle frequency range from f = 10(-4) to 10(-5) (corresponding to cyclic size 1 kb-5 kb), which may be associated with randomness of base sequence composition. This property has not been observed in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Caenorhabditis elegans, and Homo sapiens yet.